book of essays 2020

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more. 

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2020: Essay Collections

Featuring zadie smith, helen macdonald, claudia rankine, samantha irby, and more.

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2020—the longest year that has ever been—is almost at an end, and that means it’s time for us to break out the calculators and tabulate the best reviewed books of past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2020, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir & Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Graphic Literature; Poetry; Mystery & Crime; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

1. Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald (Grove)

18 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

Read Helen Macdonald on Sherlock Holmes, Ursula Le Guin, and hating On the Road here

“A former historian of science, Macdonald is as captivated by the everyday (ants, bird’s nests) as she is by the extraordinary (glowworms, total solar eclipses), and her writing often closes the distance between the two … Always, the author pushes through the gloom to look beyond herself, beyond all people, to ‘rejoice in the complexity of things’ and to see what science has to show us: ‘that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us’ … The climate crisis shadows these essays. Macdonald is not, however, given to sounding dire, all-caps warnings … For all its elegiac sentences and gray moods, Vesper Flights is a book of tremendous purpose. Throughout these essays, Macdonald revisits the idea that as a writer it is her responsibility to take stock of what’s happening to the natural world and to convey the value of the living things within it.”

–Jake Cline ( The Washington Post )

2. Intimations by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

13 Rave • 7 Positive • 3 Mixed

Listen to Zadie Smith read from Intimations here

“Smith…is a spectacular essayist—even better, I’d say, than as a novelist … Smith…get[s] at something universal, the suspicion that has infiltrated our interactions even with those we want to think we know. This is the essential job of the essayist: to explore not our innocence but our complicity. I want to say this works because Smith doesn’t take herself too seriously, but that’s not accurate. More to the point, she is willing to expose the tangle of feelings the pandemic has provoked. And this may seem a small thing, but it’s essential: I never doubt her voice on the page … Her offhandedness, at first, feels out of step with a moment in which we are desperate to feel that whatever something we are trying to do matters. But it also describes that moment perfectly … Here we see the kind of devastating self-exposure that the essay, as a form, requires—the realization of how limited we are even in the best of times, and how bereft in the worst.”

–David L. Ulin ( The Los Angeles Times )

3. Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 5 Mixed

Read an excerpt from Just Us here

“ Just Us is about intimacy. Rankine is making an appeal for real closeness. She’s advocating for candor as the pathway to achieving universal humanity and authentic love … Rankine is vulnerable, too. In ‘lemonade,’ an essay about how race and racism affect her interracial marriage, Rankine models the openness she hopes to inspire. ‘lemonade’ is hard to handle. It’s naked and confessional, deeply moving and, ultimately, inspirational … Just Us , as a book, is inventive … Claudia Rankine may be the most human human I’ve ever encountered. Her inner machinations and relentless questioning would exhaust most people. Her labor should be less necessary, of course.”

–Michael Kleber-Diggs ( The Star Tribune )

4. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World)

7 Rave • 10 Positive • 2 Mixed

Listen to an interview with Cathy Park Hong here

“Hong’s metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured … I read Minor Feelings in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch … The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and Minor Feelings serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality … Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma … Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.”

–Jia Tolentino ( The New Yorker )

5. World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Milkweed Editions)

11 Rave • 3 Positive

Read an excerpt from World of Wonders here

“In beautifully illustrated essays, poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes of exotic flora and fauna and her family, and why they are all of one piece … In days of old, books about nature were often as treasured for their illustrations as they were for their words. World of Wonders, American poet and teacher Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s prose ode to her muses in the natural world, is a throwback that way. Its words are beautiful, but its cover and interior illustrations by Fumi Mini Nakamura may well be what first moves you to pick it up in a bookstore or online … The book’s magic lies in Nezhukumatathil’s ability to blend personal and natural history, to compress into each brief essay the relationship between a biographical passage from her own family and the life trajectory of a particular plant or animal … Her kaleidoscopic observations pay off in these thoughtful, nuanced, surprise-filled essays.”

–Pamela Miller ( The Star Tribune )

6. Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby (Vintage)

10 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

Watch an interview with Samantha Irby here

“Haphazard and aimless as she claims to be, Samantha Irby’s Wow, No Thank You is purposefully hilarious, real, and full of medicine for living with our culture’s contradictory messages. From relationship advice she wasn’t asked for to surrendering her cell phone as dinner etiquette, Irby is wholly unpretentious as she opines about the unspoken expectations of adulting. Her essays poke holes and luxuriate in the weirdness of modern society … If anyone whose life is being made into a television show could continue to keep it real for her blog reading fans, it’s Irby. She proves we can still trust her authenticity not just through her questionable taste in music and descriptions of incredibly bloody periods, but through her willingness to demystify what happens in any privileged room she finds herself in … Irby defines professional lingo and describes the mundane details of exclusive industries in anecdotes that are not only entertaining but powerfully demystifying. Irby’s closeness to financial and physical precariousness combined with her willingness to enter situations she feels unprepared for make us loyal to her—she again proves herself to be a trustworthy and admirable narrator who readers will hold fast to through anything at all.”

–Molly Thornton ( Lambda Literary )

7. Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing (W. W. Norton & Company)

5 Rave • 10 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan

“Yes, you’re in for a treat … There are few voices that we can reliably read widely these days, but I would read Laing writing about proverbial paint drying (the collection is in fact quite paint-heavy), just as soon as I would read her write about the Grenfell Tower fire, The Fire This Time , or a refugee’s experience in England, The Abandoned Person’s Tale , all of which are included in Funny Weather … Laing’s knowledge of her subjects is encyclopaedic, her awe is infectious, and her critical eye is reminiscent of the critic and author James Wood … She is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature: a worthy guide with both a macro and micro vision, fluent in her chosen tongue and always full of empathy and awe.”

–Mia Colleran ( The Irish Times )

8. Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)

6 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed • 2 Pan

“A] searing look at the struggle for all Americans to achieve liberty and equality. Lalami eloquently tacks between her experiences as an immigrant to this country and the history of U.S. attempts to exclude different categories of people from the full benefits of citizenship … Lalami offers a fresh perspective on the double consciousness of the immigrant … Conditional citizenship is still conferred on people of color, women, immigrants, religious minorities, even those living in poverty, and Lalami’s insight in showing the subtle and overt ways discrimination operates in so many facets of life is one of this book’s major strengths.”

–Rachel Newcomb ( The Washington Post )

9. This is One Way to Dance by Sejal Shah (University of Georgia Press)

7 Rave • 2 Positive 

Watch an interview with Sejal Shah here

“Shah brings important, refreshing, and depressing observations about what it means to have dark skin and an ‘exotic’ name, when the only country you’ve ever lived in is America … The essays in this slim volume are engaging and thought-provoking … The essays are well-crafted with varying forms that should inspire and enlighten other essayists … A particularly delightful chapter is the last, called ‘Voice Texting with My Mother,’ which is, in fact, written in texts … Shah’s thoughts on heritage and belonging are important and interesting.”

–Martha Anne Toll ( NPR )

10. Having and Being Had by Eula Biss (Riverhead)

5 Rave • 4 Positive • 4 Mixed

Read Eula Biss on the anticapitalist origins of Monopoly here

“… enthralling … Her allusive blend of autobiography and criticism may remind some of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, a friend whose name pops up in the text alongside those of other artists and intellectuals who have influenced her work. And yet, line for line, her epigrammatic style perhaps most recalls that of Emily Dickinson in its radical compression of images and ideas into a few chiseled lines … Biss wears her erudition lightly … she’s really funny, with a barbed but understated wit … Keenly aware of her privilege as a white, well-educated woman who has benefited from a wide network of family and friends, Biss has written a book that is, in effect, the opposite of capitalism in its willingness to acknowledge that everything she’s accomplished rests on the labor of others.”

–Ann Levin ( Associated Press )

Our System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The Best American Essays 2020

A collection of the year’s best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name .

“An essay is the child of uncertainty,” André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020 . “The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace.” The essays Aciman selected center on people facing moments of deep uncertainty, searching for a greater truth. From a Black father’s confrontation of his son’s illness, to a divorcée’s transcendent experience with strangers, to a bartender grieving the tragic loss of a friend, these stories are a master class not just in essay writing but in empathy, artfully imbuing moments of hardship with understanding and that elusive grace.

The Best American 2020 Essays includes: RABIH ALAMEDDINE • BARBARA EHRENREICH • LESLIE JAMISON • JAMAICA KINCAID • ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH • A. O. SCOTT • JERALD WALKER • STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS and others 

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Longreads : The best longform stories on the web

Longreads Best of 2020: Essays

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All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of beautifully written and poignant essays published on the web. Because of the wide range of writing across many topics and themes, it was a challenge to sift through them all over the past several weeks to compile a definitive Best of Essays list. As I shortlisted stories, I realized there could be many different versions of this list, but, in the end, these eight reads really spoke to me.

If you like these, you can  sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday .

Mississippi: A Poem, in Days (Kiese Makeba Laymon, Vanity Fair )

Kiese Makeba Laymon was on a book tour when the pandemic hit in the U.S. In this stunner of a piece that unfolds over 14 days, the author writes on fear, racism, death, and home amid a moment of awakening. We follow along on the journey, from event to event in Ohio and West Virginia, with Laymon’s observations and thoughts interspersed with daily COVID-19 death counts and the latest words or orders from Donald Trump and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves. It’s a powerful meditation, one that will stop you in your tracks.

We are awakened, I want to believe. 75 miles from the armed confederate statue in Oxford, Emmett Till’s childish body was destroyed. 70 miles from that armed confederate statue, Fannie Lou Hamer was nearly beaten to death. 160 miles from that armed confederate statue, Medgar Evers was murdered as he enters his home. 80 miles from that armed confederate statue, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. It took way too much Black death to get here. I am wandering around the spiritual consequences of materially progressing at the expense of Black death. I want to be courageous. I wonder, though, when courage becomes contagious—when courage is credentialized, subsidized, and incentivized—if it is still courage at all. Today, as I prepare to push send, and I lather my hands in sanitizer, it feels a bit too much like cowardice. Maybe I’ll wait to send tomorrow. Maybe I won’t send at all. The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors, a group of white men, unanimously vote to keep the armed confederate monument in the middle of Oxford, the town where I live, teach, and write. Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel. It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

Molly (Blake Butler, The Volta )

December’s special issue of The Volta is dedicated to the late poet Molly Brodak, and Brodak’s husband, Blake Butler, writes an incredibly moving essay to remember and honor her. In “Molly,” he weaves an intimate portrait of his late wife — and the details, textures, and expanse of their relationship –with so much love and care. Grab a tissue before sitting down to read it.

Making her laugh made me feel alive, like I’d really accomplished something. She wanted to laugh, I think, despite a widening parcel in her telling her that laughter in a world like ours was for fools. When I think the sound of it now, it reminds me of a bird trapped in a ballroom, looking for anywhere to land.

But there was always something still there underneath that, shredding its pasture—parts of her so dark and displaced I cannot find them anywhere touching the rest of how she was. The story, like all stories, holds no true shape. And that’s exactly what it wants—the pain—it wants more blank to feed the pain with, to fill the space up. It wants us all.

Then, in her poem, “Horse and Cart,” one of the last she ever wrote: “I can’t even imagine a horse / anymore. / That we sat on their spines / and yanked their mouths around.” The gears of her mind, as she grew tired, wore down even these good times, seeking further ways to break them up, send her away.

I Cry for the Mountains: A Legacy Lost (Dave Daley, Chico Enterprise-Record )

California experienced another unprecedented wildfire season this year; a number of fire complexes burned throughout the state, including the massive North Complex Fire that started in August and burned in Northern California’s Plumas and Butte counties. Rancher Dave Daley offers a devastating account of the destruction of his family’s cattle range in Plumas National Forest, and a passionate plea to legislators and regulators to ultimately listen to the land and the locals when it comes to forest management. Daley originally posted this account on Facebook; his followers recommended that the Chico Enterprise-Record  reprint it for a wider audience.

I cry for the forest, the trees and streams, and the horrible deaths suffered by the wildlife and our cattle. The suffering was unimaginable. When you find groups of cows and their baby calves tumbled in a ravine trying to escape, burned almost beyond recognition or a fawn and small calf side by side as if hoping to protect one another, you try not to wretch. You only pray death was swift. Worse, in searing memory, cows with their hooves, udder and even legs burned off still alive who had to be euthanized. A doe lying in the ashes with three fawns, not all hers I bet. And you are glad they can stand and move, even with a limp, because you really cannot imagine any more death today.

For those of you on the right blaming the left and California, these are National Forest lands that are “managed” by the feds. They have failed miserably over the past 50 years. Smokey the Bear was the cruelest joke ever played on the western landscape, a decades long campaign to prevent forest fires has resulted in mega-fires of a scope we’ve never seen. Thanks, Smokey.

I get frustrated with experts and consultants who drive by and “know just what to do.” For 35 years I have attended conferences, given presentations and listened. What I have learned is solutions are local and specific. What happens in one watershed in Plumas or Butte County may be entirely different in the Lassen National Forest just next door. But experts of all kinds are glad to tell you how to do it. “Let’s prescribe graze, use virtual fences, change your timing, change your genetics.” Prescribe graze the forest and canyons? Yea. Right. They don’t know what they don’t know but they will take the honorarium anyway and have a great dinner on your dime. The locals and land rarely benefit.

How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda (Jiayang Fa n , The New Yorker )

Jiayang Fan pens a masterful piece of personal history, on her mother and their relationship, identity, family, propaganda and social media, and chronic illness (her mother has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS) . Fan recounts her struggle to help her mother get hospital care during New York’s COVID-19 crisis, all while going viral and facing threats on social media, calling her a criminal and a traitor to China. She tells a complicated and very personal story, one of loyalty and love, with strength and eloquence.

My mother has always knelt at the altar of  mianzi , an aspiration of which A.L.S. makes a spectacular mockery. You may think it’s embarrassing to slur your speech and limp, but wait until you are being spoon-fed and pushed around in a wheelchair—all of which will seem trivial once you can no longer wash or wipe yourself. The progress of the disease is a forced march toward the vanishing point of  mianzi . When my mother was first given her diagnosis, she became obsessed with the idea of why—why her, why now, and, above all, why an illness that would subject her to the kind of public humiliation she feared more than death itself. When she could still operate her first-generation iPad, my mother gave me a contact list of everyone she was still in touch with in China, and told me that, except for her siblings, no one must know of her affliction. Such self-imposed isolation seemed like madness to me, but she preferred to cut friends out of her life rather than admit to the indignity of her compromised state. Her body’s insurrection, my mother believes, is her punishment for her prideful strivings in America.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had read that a virus is neither dead nor alive, and replicates only in the shelter of a host organism. I began to think of “Jiayang Fan” as viral not in a social-media sense but in a biological one; the calamitous state of the world and certain random mutations in the story had made it unexpectedly contagious. My original posts had served their purpose; now they were serving the purposes of others. I had unwittingly bred a potent piece of propaganda.

The Promise That Tested My Parents Until the End (Christopher Solomon, GQ )

Don’t you ever put me in one of those places,  she said. Don’t put  me  in one of those places,  my father replied.

Christopher Solomon’s parents made a pledge to one another. But what did that actually look like over time, especially when his father became sick? What does unconditional love and devotion look like in our own lives? Solomon writes an honest and heartbreaking essay on love, aging, and marriage — in sickness and in health.

In time what was imperceptible in him became noticeable, and then what was noticeable became something worse. The landscape of my father changed, the coastline eroded. There was less of him, until the old map of my father no longer fit the man before us. It has been 20 years now since he was diagnosed, and sometimes it is hard to remember a time that he was not sick. His speech became a gargle of consonants. The dementia took most of his mind. His body curled in on itself—shrinking, reducing, as if he were becoming an infant again. Despite this, for years he still played the piano, every day, and nearly as well as ever—the mysteryland of the brain permitting this freedom even as body, and mind, crumbled around him. My mother would sing along from the kitchen, as she always had. And then one day, after I arrive home, my mother sounds more concerned than usual.  He has stopped playing the piano,  she says. This seems to worry her more than anything else.

Finally, exhausted, she relents. She drives to visit a nearby nursing home. Afterward she cries in the parking lot. She cries for what she sees there. She cries at the prospect of breaking the Promise. She cries because even though almost nothing remains of her husband—even though he is the cause of her sleepless nights and her tendinitis and her bruises and her anger—in 55 years she rarely has been apart from him. She loves even the scrap of him that remains. He is half of the story they share, of the red VW Beetle and the sunstruck Italian patios and the singalongs and the three towheaded children. As long as he is here, their story, however unlikely, is not yet over. She cries because the end of him is the end of a possibility. And I think, not for the first time, how little I still know about love.

Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me (Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times Magazine )

“The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attorney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do?” In this nuanced reported essay about mass incarceration in the U.S., Reginald Dwayne Betts reveals “our contradictory impulses” around crime, punishment, and the justice system. And he knows these impulses well, as both a felon and a son to a woman who was raped by a Black man.

But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that “Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it.” They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

Safe at Home in Los Angeles (Lynell George, High Country News )

Lynell George’s beautiful read exemplifies what I love about writing on place and home. A native of Los Angeles, George builds and shapes a complex L.A. in her piece: a “city of contradictions,” an elusive, ever-shifting place “built on either impermanence or illusion.” It’s a sensory and richly textured portrait of a vast place, looking at Los Angeles through a sort of kaleidoscope lens of gentrification, nature, and the pandemic lockdown.

Los Angeles has long been a contested domain — both as territory (from the Indigenous Tongva onward) and as emblem. Boosters, speculators and swindlers have had their way not just with the land but with the very image of Los Angeles. The city grew, like an opportunistic vine. It couldn’t just  be . It had to be bigger than life, better than perfect. Even within my lifetime, popular culture has conjured a vision of Los Angeles that is sleight-of-hand, a trick of light, brutally at odds with the lived experience. Los Angeles, by its sprawling nature, absolutely resists oversimplification. This, despite its frustrations, irritants and absurdities, is precisely why I remain here.

Those stories of place, the Los Angeles of my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood — the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s — couldn’t be told until we began to tell them. Until we steadied and raised our voices. Until we made our way through gatekeepers, and most significantly until we were of age and of mind to turn our attention to a shifting definition of the West (or  El Norte ), one that included stories of migration and immigration, of protest, of underemployment, of struggle, and of love and resilience despite disappointment, and in the ways in which we tend to the physical environment, to conserve against drought or be mindful of energy use and emissions. We must tend to the region’s various topographies in narrative. It’s imperative. Or they will be lost. As a chronicler, my responsibility is to try and tell an honest story. True to its roots. Even now, even in this quiet moment in the city, we must remember its cacophony, its music.

My Mustache, My Self (Wesley Morris, The New York Times Magazine )

This essay from Wesley Morris on growing a mustache during the pandemic is about so much more than quarantine-grown facial hair — it’s a brilliant and vulnerable piece on masculinity and race, one in which Morris reflects on becoming himself and considers and celebrates his Blackness.

The mustache had certainly conjoined me to a past I was flattered to be associated with, however superficially. But there were implications. During the later stages of the movement, a mustached man opened himself up to charges of white appeasement and Uncle Tom-ism. Not because of the mustache, obviously, but because of the approach of the sort of person who would choose to wear one. Such a person might not have been considered radical enough, down enough, Black enough. The civil rights mustache was strategically tolerant. It didn’t advocate burning anything down. It ran for office — and sometimes it won. It was establishmentarian, compromising and eventually, come the infernos at the close of the 1960s, it fell out of fashion, in part because it felt out of step with the urgency of the moment.

The Black-power salute is not a casual gesture. It’s weaponry. You aim that arm and fire. I aimed mine in solidarity — with white people instead of at a system they personify. And that didn’t feel quite right. But how would I know? I had never done a Black-power salute. It always seemed like more Blackness than I’ve needed, maybe more than I had. I’m not Black-power Black. I’ve always been milder, more apprehensive than that. I was practically born with a mustache.

Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Cheri has been an editor at Longreads since 2014. She's currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Intimations

By zadie smith, by zadie smith read by zadie smith, category: essays & literary collections | biography & memoir, category: essays & literary collections | biography & memoir | audiobooks.

Jul 28, 2020 | ISBN 9780593297612 | 5 x 7-1/8 --> | ISBN 9780593297612 --> Buy

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Jul 28, 2020 | 112 Minutes | ISBN 9780593346839 --> Buy

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Jul 28, 2020 | ISBN 9780593297612

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Jul 28, 2020 | ISBN 9780593346839

112 Minutes

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About Intimations

“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” — TIME , The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 “While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential . . .’” — O, The Oprah Magazine , Best Books of 2020 “Smith does more than illuminate what we’re going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what’s good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” — John Powers, Fresh Air A New York Times Bestseller Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality–or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it? Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened–and what should come next. The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.

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Also by zadie smith.

About Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a… More about Zadie Smith

Product Details

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“Lean and powerful—the collection is less than 100 pages—like pencil sketches that capture a scene or a figure in a few brief masterly strokes. When we do look back on this period, these are among the essays we will turn to . . . These essays explore, wonder, argue and prod. The pleasure of reading them lies not in receiving experience in a finished mold, but in joining Ms. Smith as she takes our shared bewilderment and begins to pour.” — Wall Street Journal   “[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.”  — TIME , The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 “While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential’—as well as on banana bread, pedicures, and tulips.”  — O, The Oprah Magazine , Best Books of 2020   “There are six essays in [Smith’s] new collection, which capture the pandemic moment we’ve been living in with a clarity that only Zadie Smith could unearth in the middle of a pandemic. Even when she’s pushing you to see your own complicity, it’s comforting to have her voice helping you make sense of the world.”  — GOOP “Zadie Smith has always been at least as phenomenal an essayist as she is a novelist. This slim, flash-published volume of reflections on life under quarantine rides the waves of dread, loneliness, community, loss and self-refection we all went through—and still are.” — Los Angeles Times  “Smith’s slim volume is a balm during an anxious year. We have learned the meaning of essential, and Smith’s prose is correspondingly stripped down. Clear. Precise. Orderly . . . An indispensable snapshot of a time when we were all scrambling to put our thoughts in order. I for one, am thankful to Smith for offering us hers.” — Tracey Baptiste, Washington Post   “A slender and moving compendium . . . [W]hat unites these quietly cerebral vignettes is a pervasive interest in and empathy for the lives of others.” — Matthew Adams, Seattle Times “One of our finest living writers has already produced what may be the first definitive chronicle of an era she dubs ‘the global humbling.’ In a series of essays both personal and political, Zadie Smith turns her sharp gaze to everything from a bouquet of peonies to the death of George Floyd, with disarming insight into her own shifting perspectives as woman, writer, mother, and citizen of the world. ‘The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art,’ she suggests at one point, too modestly; we may not have asked for Intimations, but this slim, resonant collection still feels like a gift.” — Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly   “ Intimations  is the third and slimmest of [Smith’s] essay collections, at 100 pages, but its psychic heft is substantial. In six essays that feel as intimate as a long walk with an old friend, Smith takes on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including police brutality and economic injustice. The book is grounded in inquiry far more often than in certainty, however, and the collection is one that probes, exploring everything from the relationship between privilege and suffering to the nature of isolation and what it means to be confined with the people we love.” — Ericka Taylor, NPR.org   “[Smith] is a spectacular essayist . . . who has written searchingly about race and culture, identity and place and family. Such issues continue to infuse the present, although their salience is complicated by the ways the virus has eroded collective trust . . . This is the essential job of the essayist: to explore not our innocence but our complicity. I want to say this works because Smith doesn’t take herself too seriously, but that’s not accurate. More to the point, she is willing to expose the tangle of feelings the pandemic has provoked. And this may seem a small thing, but it’s essential: I never doubt her voice on the page.” — David Ulin, Los Angeles Times   “ Intimations  feels less like a precise attempt to document the COVID-19 era than a more abstract meditation on time: who is given it, who has it taken from them, and what its sudden presence or absence can lead to. ‘Time is how you spend your love,’ Smith wrote in her 2005 novel On Beauty—quoting a poem by her own husband, Nick Laird—and  Intimations  functions impressively as a document of the mixed blessing of time as well as a searing excoriation of a society that has always apportioned it unevenly.” — Emma Specter, Vogue.com   “These days, I find in [Smith’s] work what I once found in Paley and Baldwin — a clarifying lucidity wedded to big-hearted moral awareness. These virtues shine through her powerful new collection, Intimations: Six Essays , which she began at the onset of the pandemic and finished shortly after Floyd’s killing. Although only 100 pages, it made me think more than most books five times that length. There’s something worth quoting on virtually every page . . . Smith does more than illuminate what we’re going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what’s good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” — John Powers, Fresh Air   “ Intimations , [Smith’s] slender new collection (less than 100 pages) of ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness. This cast of mind doesn’t mean that Smith avoids moral stances. In Intimations , she speaks clearly and forcefully about the murder of George Floyd and the legacy of slavery and the systemic sins revealed by Covid-19 . . . But despite these jabs, Smith remains unmistakably noncombative. This spirit appears born not of a fear of confrontation but a genuine perplexity (of a searching, brilliant kind) at the nature of experience and people, including herself. . . . Smith’s gifts as a novelist animate her essays . . . In Zadie Smith’s universe—meaning, for my money, the one we’re all living in—complexity is king.” — John Williams, The New York Times   “Slender, solacing . . . To read Zadie Smith is to recognize how few writers seem to genuinely love human beings the way she does, with such infinite curiosity and attention, even when they are behaving monstrously. Or, for that matter, how few are able to do justice to what, for want of a better term, we’ll call common decency.” — Laura Miller, Slate  “What a treat, then, that Zadie Smith has presented us with this jewel of a book, six essays all written at the beginning of lockdown, each generous, reliably insightful explorations of things like suffering, productivity, and love; all reminders of the kind of art people are capable of, even in the most dire of times.” — Refinery29   “Incisive and insightful . . . Smith is at her perceptive and precise best in this slim but thematically weighty volume of personal and civil reckoning.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “There will be innumerable books to come about life in the pandemic, but Zadie Smith is who we want to read  right now . . . This will be essential reading for us now, and when we look back in the years to come.” —Town & Country, Best Books to Read This July “[Smith] writes with the immediacy of a house on fire, illuminating the tumult we are collectively experiencing . . . A sharply honed, obsidian collection glowing with Smith’s insights and eloquence.”  — Booklist “An incisive collection . . . In just under 100 pages, Smith intimately captures the profundity of our current historical moment. Quietly powerful, deftly crafted essays bear witness to the contagion of suffering.” — Kirkus  (starred review)

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The Best Books of 2020 You Should Be Reading Right Now

By Crystal Bell

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You've probably had a lot of time to put a dent in your reading list this year, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you actually did. Listen, things happen! Even in this seemingly endless period of quarantine and self-reflection known as 2020, there's been a lot to keep up with—and that means the best books of 2020 might not exactly be your first priority. This year’s new book releases, however, provide endless options for enjoyment, from incisive essays written during quarantine, to tales of heroism and hope, to thrilling stories of intrigue and friendship.

In a year that has mostly grounded us in one place, diving into a really good book—immersing yourself in its world, living in its language, and transporting your heart and mind to places all around the globe—has been a necessary reprieve. And that's what these titles all have in common. Whether you're looking for sweet escapism from your everyday life or you're searching for a bit of clarity among all of this uncertainty, there's something for everyone on this list.

So stop your doomscrolling and check out the best books of 2020.

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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

It's easy to see why Brit Bennett's poignant sophomore novel The Vanishing Half has been heralded as the year's best. Set in 1968 during a period of profound unrest and nationwide civil rights protests—and released this past summer amid more unrest and protests— The Vanishing Half follows identical twin sisters from a small Louisiana town who choose to live very different lives as adults, one as a Black woman and one passing as white. Bennett explores how this one decision changes the course of two lives, spanning generations of self-reflection, discovery, and resentment. Is it possible to escape your inherited racial trauma, to erase the past in the name of a better future?

Here For It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America by R. Eric Thomas

Elle.com columnist R. Eric Thomas brings his signature candor and humor to his book of autobiographical essays, Here For It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America . Released in the Before Time, or before the world entered lockdown to slow the spread of COVID-19, this witty, introspective collection now reads like a balm for an anxious soul. Each essay examines what it means to be seen as "other" by the world—and by yourself—through Eric's own life experience as a Black, gay man living in America. In Here For It , a writer navigates his own marginalization and self-acceptance through stories of code-switching in college and reconciling his Christian faith with his sexuality, and in doing so he attempts to make a few conclusions about what it means to really, truly be yourself when your very identity seems at odds with the world.

The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes by Elissa R. Sloan

In her debut novel The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes , author Elissa R. Sloan ponders the dark side of fame with the tragic fictional tale of Cassidy Holmes, a pop star from the early 2000s who dies by suicide and leaves her former bandmates with more questions than answers. Told through the eyes of the four members of girl group Gloss, including Cassidy herself, the narrative charts the band's swift rise and fall, unfolding like a mystery as it weaves together both the past and present to give Cassidy (also known as "Sassy Gloss") a sense of justice. The novel also captures the exploitative aura of the early aughts, a time when celebrity reigned supreme. Think of it as 13 Reasons Why meets Daisy Jones & The Six —a mediation on fame, friendships, depression—and it will keep you turning until the last page. But be prepared: It's a slow burn.

Intimations by Zadie Smith

A brief collection of essays written during lockdown, Zadie Smith's Intimations captures the specificity of this moment, a period now frozen in time and memory. The book finds the prolific author working through her own thoughts amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. She recalls people and moments in tender, exact detail—the IT guy, the homeless man, the old woman who lives alone in her rent-controlled apartment, the man who owns the nail salon down the block. But Zadie's ability to draw clarity from these exchanges and observations is her strength, and a reminder that even amid panic and uncertainty there's still some healing to be found in the creative process—or, at least it's something to do when there's not a lot else to be done. "There is no great difference between novels and banana bread," she reasons. Perhaps she's right. And Intimations , like baked bread, is warm and filling and homemade—an experiment cooked up quickly but nevertheless made with love.

They Wish They Were Us by Jessica Goodman

A debut novel years in the making, They Wish They Were Us is a YA thriller that already has a TV adaptation in the works with real-life friends Sydney Sweeney and Halsey attached to star and produce the project. A story of rich kids behaving badly, author and Cosmopolitan editor Jessica Goodman poses the question, how far would someone go to be popular? At Gold Coast Prep, an elite secret society known as The Players rule the school—they get the best grades, they throw the best parties, and they're the ones everyone wants to be and be with. But pretty, popular Jill Newman's seemingly perfect senior year is turned upside-down when she receives a text from someone who claims that there's more to the story of her best friend Shaila Arnold's murder than previously thought. So now it's up to Jill to solve the crime. Murder. Intrigue. Class. Influence. Power. Welcome to The Players' twisted inner circle, where secrets are buried deep.

A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Yet another stunning debut, Megha Majumdar's A Burning is a timely and thrilling story of injustice, corruption, and oppression that begins with a terrorist attack in modern-day Kolkata, India. Jivan, a poor Muslim woman, is charged with helping execute the gruesome attack after a miscalculated Facebook post criticizing the police makes her a target. The novel also follows Lovely, a young woman who is a hijra , or someone from a higher social class that is thought to be connected to divinity. However, her class puts her at direct odds with her dream of becoming a movie star, which is looked down upon by those around. But Lovely never accepts that shame. Two stories of womanhood told from very different perspectives, but the systems of discrimination and misogyny are all the same. The true beauty of Megha's work is that even amidst such oppression, her characters never lose their ability to dream for a better tomorrow. Ultimately, it's a tale of hope and perseverance—an important message for so many people in 2020.

The Death Of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

Despite its title, Akwaeke Emezi's devastating The Death of Vivek Oji is actually about life, a life cut too short but one that was no less meaningful. Set in Nigeria where Emezi grew up, the novel explores gender and identity through the eyes of Vivek Oji, a young person who's prevented from being their true self in life because of pressures from their family and a society that punishes those who are deemed different. But in death—a final act of transcendence—Vivek can be their true self, and as loved ones process their own grief they also come to accept Vivek and uncover the life of someone they never allowed themselves to fully know. Equal parts heartwarming and emotionally shattering, the life and death of Vivek Oji is truly unforgettable.

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Pizza Girl is feeling a little lost. Understandably so. She's 18 years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl. Life is nothing more than an endless stack of warm pies and horrifying sameness. Such is the premise of Jean Kyoung Frazier's colorful debut novel Pizza Girl , a coming-of-age story that finds its reluctant young heroine grappling with a host of issues: impending motherhood, her Korean-American identity, her alcoholic father's death, her immigrant mother's expectations, and her overwhelming feelings of resentment. Her boyfriend is supportive yet suffocating, and the last feeling she can muster up is any sort of excitement for the future. Until she meets Jenny, a customer whose unusual order of pepperoni and pickles breaks her out of her aimless spell. It's an infatuation forged from the desire to surround herself with someone who's even more of a mess than she is—but in trying to fix someone else she comes face to face with her own self-destructive habits and ends up helping herself in the process.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Is there a scientific explanation for human suffering? Gifty, a Ghanaian-American neuroscience PhD candidate, wants to find out in Transcendent Kingdom . Surely, there must be a logical reason for why her family has suffered so much, first with the departure of her father, who returned to Ghana when she was was just a child, then with the loss of her brother—a star athlete who died from a heroin overdose after an ankle injury—and now with her mother's deep depression. But as Gifty turns to science for answers, she also begins to reckon with her childhood faith. Is salvation possible? Is grief inevitable? Is there a meaning to all of this suffering? These are the heady questions at the heart of Yaa Gyasi's stunning novel. And maybe they've been at the forefront of your mind too this year.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

Part memoir, part cautionary tale, Anna Wiener's incisive Uncanny Valley chronicles her time working at tech startups in Silicon Valley during the boom period of 2013 through 2016—a time of "no hurdles, no limits, no bad ideas," as she describes. The reality, of course, was more dystopian than utopian. The book not only illuminates the tech industry’s structural inequalities for women, but it also details how those imbalances of power lead to a workplace culture that prioritizes productivity over personal health and the ways in which technology is being used as a tool for surveillance, not service. Full of funny, insightful anecdotes and enough corporate garbage language to last several lifetimes, Uncanny Valley is both essential and unsettling.

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The Best Books of 2020

This year, we were captivated by stories from literary icons, debut novelists, and more.

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2020 came and went fast, but fortunately, the publishing industry kept pace with the passage of time with a slew of the year’s most anticipated titles. Here, take a look back at the best new books that arrived this year—and add them to your 2021 reading list if you haven't dug into them yet.

The Lying Life of Adults

Revealed via surprise announcement in September 2019, the reclusive writer’s latest title leaves behind the characters of the Neapolitan Novels to tell a new tale in the same setting. Playing on Ferrante’s favorite themes of beauty versus ugliness and class mobility, The Lying Life of Adults tells the story of a rich and rebellious teenager’s coming of age in a divided Naples. 

From  Prep  to  American Wife , Curtis Sittenfeld has built a name for herself as contemporary fiction’s foremost chronicler of WASP America. Now, she turns her literary lens away from wry observation and towards the realm of one particularly topical what-if: What would have happened if Hillary Rodham had never agreed to marry Bill Clinton?

Transcendent Kingdom: A Novel

From the author of Homegoing , the breakout debut novel about the two very different legacies of an Asante woman living in 18th-century Ghana, comes a contemporary tale of a Ghanaian family in Alabama struggling to make sense of loss. 

The Glass Hotel: A novel

Fans of the genre-defying post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven , rejoice: Emily St. John Mandel is back with a new novel that weaves otherworldly elements throughout the storyline of a modern financial thriller.  

My Dark Vanessa: A Novel

When a fellow former student comes forward with sexual misconduct allegations against Vanessa’s high school English teacher, Jacob, Vanessa must grapple with a discomfiting question: whether her own teenage affair with Jacob was as consensual as she’s been telling herself for 17 years. In the age of #MeToo, Russell’s blistering, deeply uncomfortable, and utterly essential debut achieves required-reading status. 

The Death of Vivek Oji: A Novel

With Freshwater and Pet under their belt, Akwaeke Emezi has cemented their reputation as a leading new voice in both YA and adult literary fiction in the span of less than two years. They’re not slowing up anytime soon, either: In their sophomore adult novel, out this summer, Emezi chronicles a Nigerian family’s experience of grief and transcendence. 

Real Life: A Novel

From a black, queer writer and former biochem Ph.D. candidate living in a Midwestern university town comes a searing debut about … a black, queer biochem Ph.D. candidate living in a Midwestern university town. When Wallace has an unexpected encounter with a supposedly-straight white classmate amid a time of mounting hostility in his community, he is forced to confront long-hidden wounds. Whether despite or because of Taylor’s closeness to his subject matter, the result is a novel of quiet, startling power. 

Wow, No Thank You.: Essays

Ever since the publication of Meaty in 2013, Irby’s essays have been required reading on the millennial condition. In her latest collection, the writer—now approaching 40 and living a Pinterest-ified version of the American dream in a small Midwestern town—turns her addictively bummed-out wit to topics like “lesbian bed death” and the difficulty of making adult friendships. 

Death in Her Hands: A Novel

Dark and sharp as ever, the author of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation returns with a tale of a woman in a small town who may or may not have discovered evidence of a murder. The problem: She can’t figure out whether or not anyone has actually been killed.  

It's Not All Downhill From Here: A Novel

How Stella Got Her Groove Back grows up in the author’s latest title, a story about what it takes to pursue joy after unexpected loss. Sixty-eight-year-old Loretha Curry has a full life, but when the unthinkable—and unforeseeable—happens, Loretha must turn to her friends for help healing old wounds and learning how to thrive.  

The Vanishing Half: A Novel

When the Vignes twin sisters were growing up, they were inseparable. But now, as adults, they’ve taken two paths: one living with her Black daughter in the same community she’s known her whole life; the other passing as white and living among loved ones who have no idea where she came from. Propulsive and compassionate, Bennett’s follow-up to The Mothers is not to be missed. 

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Long a pillar of Black Twitter, Mikki Kendall is perhaps best known for her creation of the viral hashtags #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #FastTailedGirls, and #FoodGentrification. With HOOD FEMINISM , Kendall takes her timely and powerful critique of contemporary feminism from the worldwide web to the printed page. 

Fairest: A Memoir

With her debut title, award-winning journalist Talusan turns her talents to memoir to chart her path from childhood in a rural Philippine village to adult life as a white-passing trans woman in American academia. The result is a stirring meditation on race, gender, and identity. 

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

The resisters: a novel.

In the half-submerged AutoAmerica of the near future, a young girl’s preternatural baseball prowess enables her ascent from the underclass of a sharply-divided dystopian society to the upper echelons of its elite—even as her mother mounts a challenge to the very foundations of the world they know. Cautionary and warm, witty and unsettling, Jen’s fifth novel paints a portrait of an evolution of American society that feels ever more plausible. 

The author of 2012’s acclaimed Heroines is back with a quietly stirring account of an unnamed writer’s self-imposed isolation. Desperate to complete her overdue novel, the narrator haunts the street shops of her neighborhood in search of inspiration—but as winter approaches, her progress is interrupted by a series of unsettling disturbances.

Chosen Ones

The Hunger Games . Harry Potter . The Percy Jackson books. Wherever you first encountered it, it’s a story we all know by heart: In a time of darkness, a child is singled out as the world’s last great hope for salvation. As that child grows up, one must take ownership of their powers, fulfill the prophecy, and save the world. But what happens to the chosen one after the threat is vanquished? Veronica Roth—the author of a little franchise you may know by the name of Divergent —sets out to answer this question in her adult debut, which follows five former teenage heroes as they make sense of the trauma they were left with after saving the world.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

Though she’s racked up accolades for her two recent novels— Find Me , her debut full-length narrative from 2015, and The Third Hotel from 2018—the short story seems to be Laura van den Berg’s most natural medium. For proof, look no further than I Hold a Wolf by the Ears , the writer’s latest collection of melancholic adult fairy tales. 

Just Like You: A Novel

If you’ve already devoured the Zoe Kravitz-led series High Fidelity and are desperate for your next big binge, you’re in luck: Nick Hornby, author of the Hulu show’s source material, has another unputdownable story of love and heartbreak coming this September. In Just Like You , not-quite-divorced 42-year-old Lucy is thrown for a loop when she realizes that 22-year-old Joseph—the man she’s hired to babysit her kids—just may be her perfect match.

Out September 29, 2020.

Perfect Tunes

From her Gawker days in the early aughts to her present-day Twitter presence, Emily Gould has made a name for herself as the Internet’s foremost chronicler of the millennial condition. Now, with the release of her sophomore novel, the founder of now-defunct indie publisher Emily Books looks back on the 21st century and draws a line through the decades-long series of little choices that make us who we are. Laura, Gould’s protagonist, arrives in New York in the early 2000s to pursue ambitions of songwriting stardom, but her plan gets turned upside down when she winds up pregnant. Fifteen years later, Laura’s teenage daughter, Marie, begins to ask questions about the dreams her mother left behind.

Keely Weiss is a writer and filmmaker. She has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and Virginia and has a cat named after Perry Mason.

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The best essay collections to read now

From advice on friendship and understanding modern life to getting a grasp on coronavirus, these books offer insight on life. 

What better way to get into the work of a writer than through a collection of their essays? 

These seven collections, from novelists and critics alike, address a myriad of subjects from friendship to how colleges are dealing with sexual assaults on campus to race and racism. 

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (2019)

As a staff writer at The New Yorker , Jia Tolentino has explored everything from a rise in youth vaping to the ongoing cultural reckoning about sexual assault. Her first book Trick Mirror takes some of those pieces for The New Yorker as well as new work to form what is one of the sharpest collections of cultural criticism today.

Using herself and her own coming of age as a lens for many of the essays, Tolentino turns her pen and her eye to everything from her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings to how college campuses deal with sexual assault.

If you’re looking for an insight into millennial life, then Trick Mirror should be on your to-read list.

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker (1983)

Sometimes essays collected from a sprawling period of a successful writer’s life can feel like a hasty addition to a bibliography; a smash-and-grab of notebook flotsam. Not so In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens , from which one can truly understand the sheer range of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s range of study and activism. From Walker’s first published piece of non-fiction (for which she won a prize, and spent her winnings on cut peonies) to more elegiac pieces about her heritage, Walker’s thoughts on feminism (which she terms “womanism”) and the Civil Rights Movement remain grippingly pertinent 50 years on.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000)

That David Sedaris’s ascent to literary stardom happened later in his life – his breakthrough collection of humour essays was released when he was 44 – suited the author’s writing style perfectly. Me Talk Pretty One Day is both a painfully funny account of his childhood and an enduring snapshot of mid-forties malaise. First story ‘Go Carolina’, about his attempt to transcend a childhood lisp, is told from a perfect distance and with all the worldliness necessary to milk every drop of tragic, cringeworthy humour from his childhood. It never falters from there: by the book’s second half, in which Sedaris is living in France, he’s firmly established his niche, writing about the ways that even snobs experience utter humiliation ­– and Me Talk Pretty One Day is all the more human for it. 

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The Best American Essays 2020

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A collection of the year's best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name. "An essay is the child of uncertainty," André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020. "The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace." The essays Aciman selected center on people facing moments of deep uncertainty, searching for a greater truth. From a Black father's confrontation of his son's illness, to a divorcée's transcendent experience with strangers, to a bartender grieving the tragic loss of a friend, these stories are a master class not just in essay writing but in empathy, artfully imbuing moments of hardship with understanding and that elusive grace. The Best American 2020 Essays includes RABIH ALAMEDDINE • BARBARA EHRENREICH • LESLIE JAMISON JAMAICA KINCAID • ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH • A. O. SCOTT • JERALD WALKER • STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS and others

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• Release date: November 3, 2020

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Publisher: HarperCollins

Kindle Book Release date: November 3, 2020

OverDrive Read ISBN: 9780358358589 Release date: November 3, 2020

EPUB ebook ISBN: 9780358358589 File size: 4708 KB Release date: November 3, 2020

• Robert Atwan - Author
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• Languages English

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100 Must-Read Essay Collections

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

There’s something about a shiny new collection of essays that makes my heart beat a little faster. If you feel the same way, can we be friends? If not, might I suggest that perhaps you just haven’t found the right collection yet? I don’t expect everyone to love the thought of sitting down with a nice, juicy personal essay, but I also think the genre gets a bad rap because people associate it with the kind of thing they had to write in school.

Well, essays don’t have to be like the kind of thing you wrote in school. Essays can be anything, really. They can be personal, confessional, argumentative, informative, funny, sad, shocking, sexy, and all of the above. The best essayists can make any subject interesting. If I love an essayist, I’ll read whatever they write. I’ll follow their minds anywhere. Because that’s really what I want out of an essay — the sense that I’m spending time with an interesting mind. I want a companionable, challenging, smart, surprising voice in my head.

So below is my list, not of essay collections I think everybody “must read,” even if that’s what my title says, but collections I hope you will consider checking out if you want to.

1. Against Interpretation — Susan Sontag

2. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere — André Aciman

3. American Romances — Rebecca Brown

4. Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick

5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate

6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay

7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan

9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon

10. The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann Beard

11. The Braindead Megaphone — George Saunders

12. Broken Republic: Three Essays — Arundhati Roy

13. Changing My Mind — Zadie Smith

14. A Collection of Essays — George Orwell

15. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf

16. Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace

17. The Crack-up — F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. Discontent and its Civilizations — Mohsin Hamid

19. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric — Claudia Rankine

20. Dreaming of Hitler — Daphne Merkin

21. Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jameson

23. Essays After Eighty — Donald Hall

24. Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenko

25. The Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb

26. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader — Anne Fadiman

27. A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit

28. Findings — Kathleen Jamie

29. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin

30. The Folded Clock — Heidi Julavits

31. Forty-One False Starts — Janet Malcolm

32. How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America — Kiese Laymon

33. I Feel Bad About My Neck — Nora Ephron

34. I Just Lately Started Buying Wings — Kim Dana Kupperman

35. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction — anthology, edited by Lee Gutkind

36. In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki

37. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens — Alice Walker

38. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — Mindy Kaling

39. I Was Told There’d Be Cake — Sloane Crosley

40. Karaoke Culture — Dubravka Ugresic

41. Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges

42. Living, Thinking, Looking — Siri Hustvedt

43. Loitering — Charles D’Ambrosio

44. Lunch With a Bigot — Amitava Kumar

45. Madness, Rack, and Honey — Mary Ruefle

46. Magic Hours — Tom Bissell

47. Meatless Days — Sara Suleri

48. Meaty — Samantha Irby

49. Meditations from a Movable Chair — Andre Dubus

50. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood — Mary McCarthy

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris

52. Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal — Wendy S. Walters

53. My 1980s and Other Essays — Wayne Koestenbaum

54. The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Making of the American Essay — anthologies, edited by John D’Agata

55. The Norton Book of Personal Essays — anthology, edited by Joseph Epstein

56. Notes from No Man’s Land — Eula Biss

57. Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

58. Not That Kind of Girl — Lena Dunham

59. On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry

60. Once I Was Cool — Megan Stielstra

61. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write — Sarah Ruhl

62. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored — Adam Phillips

63. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence — Adrienne Rich

64. The Opposite of Loneliness — Marina Keegan

65. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition — Geoff Dyer

66. Paris to the Moon — Adam Gopnik

67. Passions of the Mind — A.S. Byatt

68. The Pillow Book — Sei Shonagon

69. A Place to Live — Natalia Ginzburg

70. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination — Toni Morrison

71. Pulphead — John Jeremiah Sullivan

72. Selected Essays — Michel de Montaigne

73. Shadow and Act — Ralph Ellison

74. Sidewalks — Valeria Luiselli

75. Sister Outsider — Audre Lorde

76. The Size of Thoughts — Nicholson Baker

77. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion

78. The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois

79. The Story About the Story — anthology, edited by J.C. Hallman

80. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — David Foster Wallace

81. Ten Years in the Tub — Nick Hornby

82. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man — Henry Louis Gates

83. This Is Running for Your Life — Michelle Orange

84. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage — Ann Patchett

85. Tiny Beautiful Things — Cheryl Strayed

86. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture — Gerald Early

87. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints — Joan Acocella

88. The Unspeakable — Meghan Daum

89. Vermeer in Bosnia — Lawrence Weschler

90. The Wave in the Mind — Ursula K. Le Guin

91. We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think — Shirley Hazzard

92. We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

93. What Are People For? — Wendell Berry

94. When I Was a Child I Read Books — Marilynne Robinson

95. The White Album — Joan Didion

96. White Girls — Hilton Als

97. The Woman Warrior — Maxine Hong Kinston

98. The Writing Life — Annie Dillard

99. Writing With Intent — Margaret Atwood

100. You Don’t Have to Like Me — Alida Nugent

If you have a favorite essay collection I’ve missed here, let me know in the comments!

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Top 10 books about creative writing

From linguistics to essays by Zadie Smith and Toni Morrison, poet Anthony Anaxagorou recommends some ‘lateral’ ways in to a demanding craft

T he poet Rita Dove was once asked what makes poetry successful. She went on to illuminate three key areas: First, the heart of the writer; the things they wish to say – their politics and overarching sensibilities. Second, their tools: how they work language to organise and position words. And the third, the love a person must have for books: “To read, read, read.”

When I started mapping out How to Write It , I wanted to focus on the aspects of writing development that took in both theoretical and interpersonal aspects. No writer lives in a vacuum, their job is an endless task of paying attention.

How do I get myself an agent? What’s the best way to approach a publisher? Should I self-publish? There is never one way to assuage the concerns of those looking to make a career out of writing. Many labour tirelessly for decades on manuscripts that never make it to print. The UK on average publishes around 185,000 new titles per year, ranking us the third largest publishing market in the world, yet the number of aspiring writers is substantially greater.

Writers writing about writing can become a supercilious endeavour; I’m more interested in the process of making work and the writer’s perspectives that substantiate the framework.

There’s no single authority, anything is possible. All that’s required are some words and an idea – which makes the art of writing enticing but also difficult and daunting. The books listed below, diverse in their central arguments and genres, guide us towards more interesting and lateral ways to think about what we want to say, and ultimately, how we choose to say it.

1. The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner An intellectual meditation on the cultural function of poetry. Less idealistic than other poetry criticism, Lerner puts forward a richly layered case for the reasons writers and readers alike turn to poetry, probing into why it’s often misconceived as elitist or tedious, and asks that we reconsider the value we place on the art form today.

2. Find Your Voice by Angie Thomas One of the hardest things about creative writing is developing a voice and not compromising your vision for the sake of public appeal. Thomas offers sharp advice to those wrestling with novels or Young Adult fiction. She writes with appealing honesty, taking in everything from writer’s block to deciding what a final draft should look like. The book also comes interspersed with prompts and writing exercises alongside other tips and suggestions to help airlift writers out of the mud.

3. Linguistics: Why It Matters by Geoffrey K Pullum If language is in a constant state of flux, and rules governing sentence construction, meaning and logic are always at a point of contention, what then can conventional modes of language and linguistics tell us about ourselves, our cultures and our relationship to the material world? Pullum addresses a number of philosophical questions through the scientific study of human languages – their grammars, clauses and limitations. An approachable, fascinating resource for those interested in the mechanics of words.

4. Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle The collected lectures of poet and professor Mary Ruefle present us with an erudite inquiry into some of the major aspects of a writer’s mind and craft. Ruefle possesses an uncanny ability to excavate broad and complex subjects with such unforced and original lucidity that you come away feeling as if you’ve acquired an entirely new perspective from only a few pages. Themes range from sentimentality in poetry, to fear, beginnings and – a topic she returns to throughout the book – wonder. “A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.”

5. Feel Free by Zadie Smith These astute and topical essays dating from 2010 to 2017 demonstrate Smith’s forensic ability to navigate and unpack everything from Brexit to Justin Bieber. Dissecting high philosophical works then bringing the focus back on to her own practice as a fiction writer, her essay The I Who Is Not Me sees Smith extrapolate on how autobiography shapes novel writing, and elucidates her approach to thinking around British society’s tenuous and often binary perspectives on race, class and ethnicity.

6. Threads by Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya and Bhanu Kapil Who occupies the “I” in poetry? When poets write, are they personally embodying their speakers or are they intended to be emblematic of something larger and more complex? Is the “I” assumed to be immutable or is it more porous? These are the questions posited in Threads, which illuminates the function of the lyric “I” in relation to whiteness, maleness and Britishness. Its short but acute essays interrogate whiteness’s hegemony in literature and language, revealing how writers from outside the dominant paradigm are often made to reckon with the positions and perspectives they write from.

7. Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison An urgent set of essays and lectures from the late Nobel prize winner that collates her most discerning musings around citizenship, race and art, as well as offering invaluable insight into the craft of writing. She reflects on revisions made to her most famous novel, Beloved, while also reflecting on the ways vernaculars can shape new stories. One of my favourite aphorisms written by Morrison sits on my desk and declares: “As writers, what we do is remember. And to remember this world is to create it.”

8. On Poetry by Jonathan Davidson Poetry can be thought of as something arduous or an exercise in analysis, existing either within small artistic enclaves or secondary school classrooms. One of the many strengths of Davidson’s writing is how he makes poetry feel intimate and personal, neither dry or remote. His approach to thinking around ways that certain poems affect us is well measured without being exclusive. A timely and resourceful book for writers interested in how poems go on to live with us throughout our lives.

9. Essays by Lydia Davis From flash fiction to stories, Davis is recognised as one of the preeminent writers of short-form fiction. In these essays, spanning several decades, she tracks much of her writing process and her relationship to experimentalism, form and the ways language can work when pushed to its outer limits. How we read into lines is something Davis returns to, as is the idea of risk and brevity within micro-fiction.

10. Essayism by Brian Dillon Dillon summarises the essay as an “experiment in attention”. This dynamic and robust consideration of the form sheds light on how and why certain essays have changed the cultural and political landscape, from the end of the Middle Ages to the present time. A sharp and curious disquisition on one of the more popular yet challenging writing enterprises.

How to Write It by Anthony Anaxagorou is published by Merky Books. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com .

• Creative writing
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• Zadie Smith
• Lydia Davis

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The Winds of Winter: Everything We Know About the Next Game of Thrones Book

Winter is (eventually... hopefully) coming..

The Winds of Winter, the long, long-awaited sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, is among the most-anticipated works of fiction. The next entry in the fantasy saga on which HBO’s Game of Thrones was based has been in the works since Book 5, A Dance with Dragons, which was released back in 2011. In the 13 years since, HBO aired Seasons 2-8 of Game of Thrones and Season 1 ( and soon 2 ) of its first GoT spinoff series, House of the Dragon.

While Martin continues work on the next A Song of Ice and Fire novel, we’ve compiled an overview of everything we know about The Winds of Winter, from Martin’s comments on the book’s length and publishing timeline to the story’s characters and differences from the show.

• When will it come out?
• How long will it be?
• Story details
• Book vs. TV series

Winds of Winter Release Date

There is no release date or window for The Winds of Winter.

Martin and his publishers initially hoped to have the manuscript completed by the end of October 2015 in order to release Winds the following March ahead of Game of Thrones: Season 6, according to Martin . That soft deadline then turned to the end of 2015, which also came and went without a completed manuscript. In January 2017 , he expressed optimism that it’d be out before that year’s end. In 2020, the author aimed to finish the project's initial work by 2021 , though that timeline didn’t pan out. This seems to be the last time Martin made a public estimation for when Winds will be published.

In October 2022, Martin said he was about 75% done with the manuscript. Little progress was seemingly made over the next year, as Martin announced in November 2023 that 1,100 pages had been completed — the same amount he mentioned in a December 2022 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert . Martin last mentioned Winds in a December 2023 blog post , in which he stated he’d been working on the book in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he resides.

Do you think George R.R. Martin will finish A Song of Ice and Fire?

Winds of winter length.

The Winds of Winter will be around 1,500 pages. Martin said, as of November 2023, he had written roughly 1,100 pages and had “ hundreds more pages to go ." The author has said the final two A Song of Ice and Fire books will collectively come in at over 3,000 pages.

Should The Winds of Winter come in at 1,500 pages, it’d be the longest A Song of Ice and Fire book so far. The current longest is the fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, which was just over 1,000 pages in its original hardcover release.

Winds of Winter Story

There are no spoilers in this section, save for the names of characters who will appear in The Winds of Winter.

The Winds of Winter will continue the events of the fourth and fifth books: A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. (Books 4 and 5 followed different characters but narratively ran parallel to each other.) Martin, speaking with Smarter Travel in 2012, said Winds will start with a bang:

“There were a of cliffhangers at the end of A Dance with Dragons. Those will be resolved very early. I’m going to open with the two big battles that I was building up to, the battle in the ice [between the forces of Stannis Baratheon and Roose Bolton in and around Winterfell] and the battle at Meereen — the battle of Slaver’s Bay [between the forces of Daenerys Targaryen and the slavers of Yunkai across the Narrow Sea].”

The 25 Best Game of Thrones Episodes

Daenerys Targaryen’s and Tyrion Lannister’s paths will finally cross “in a way,” Martin told EW in 2014, “but for much of the book they’re still apart. They both have quite large roles to play here. Tyrion has decided that he actually would like to live, for one thing, which he wasn’t entirely sure of during the last book, and he’s now working toward that end — if he can survive the battle that’s breaking out all around him. And Dany has embraced her heritage as a Targaryen and embraced the Targaryen words. So they’re both coming home.”

In that same interview, Martin confirmed the Dothraki will return “in a big way” and, as the end of Book 5 suggests, “a lot of stuff is happening at The Wall.” On a more direct yet less consequential note, Martin has said Winds will introduce his “interesting take on unicorns,” according to Winter Is Coming .

Overall, Martin has said to expect things to “get worse before they get better.” “There are a lot of dark chapters right now in the book that I’m writing,” Martin said at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2016 (via EW ). “It is called The Winds of Winter, and I’ve been telling you for 20 years that winter was coming. Winter is the time when things die, and cold and ice and darkness fill the world, so this is not going to be the happy feel-good that people may be hoping for. Some of the characters [are] in very dark places.”

Winds of Winter Characters

As of 2016 , Martin was not planning to include any new point-of-view characters in Winds. Here’s a quick list of all the characters confirmed to have chapters told from their perspective, per Martin’s hitherto released preview chapters, blog posts, and public readings:

• Tyrion Lannister
• Cersei Lannister
• Jaime Lannister and/or Brienne of Tarth
• Sansa Stark
• Theon Greyjoy
• Asha Greyjoy
• Victarion Greyjoy
• Aeron Greyjoy/Damphair
• Barristan Selmy
• Arianne Martell
• Jon Connington

While unconfirmed, it’s all but certain Daenerys Targaryen will again be a point-of-view character. Other potential POV characters include Davos Seaworth, Samwell Tarly, and Melisandre. We also know Robb Stark’s wife Jeyne Westerling (replaced in the TV series by a character named Talisa Maegyr) will appear in the prologue, according to Hypable , though Martin didn’t say the section would be written from her perspective.

House of the Dragon Season 2 First Look Images

Winds of Winter: Book vs. TV Show

Given the larger cast and overall scope of the book series, Winds of Winter will differ from what viewers experienced in Game of Thrones . Martin has said characters who died in the series won’t die in the books, and characters who survived in Game of Thrones won’t survive in the books. New characters will be introduced; characters who never appeared on-screen will have important roles to play in the story to come.

Martin wrote about the topic in length in a 2022 blog post :

What I have noticed more and more of late, however, is my gardening is taking me further and further away from the television series. Yes, some of the things you saw on HBO in Game of Thrones you will also see in The Winds of Winter (though maybe not in quite the same ways)… but much of the rest will be quite different.

And really, when you think about it, this was inevitable. The novels are much bigger and much much more complex than the series. Certain things that happened on HBO will not happen in the books. And vice versa. I have viewpoint characters in the books never seen on the show: Victarion Greyjoy, Arianne Martell, Areo Hotah, Jon Connington, Aeron Damphair. They will all have chapters, and the things they do and say will impact the story and the major characters who were on the show. I have legions of secondary characters, not POVs but nonetheless important to the plot, who also figure in the story: Lady Stoneheart, Young Griff, the Tattered Prince, Penny, Brown Ben Plumm, the Shavepate, Marwyn the Mage, Darkstar, Jeyne Westerling. Some characters you saw in the show are quite different than the versions in the novels. Yarra Greyjoy is not Asha Greyjoy, and HBO’s Euron Greyjoy is way, way, way, way different from mine. Quaithe still has a part to play. So does Rickon Stark. And poor Jeyne Poole. And… well, the list is long. (And all this is part of why Winds is taking so long. This is hard, guys).

Oh, and there will be new characters as well. No new viewpoints, I promise you that, but with all these journeys and battles and scheming to come, inevitably our major players will be encountering new people in lands far and near.

One thing I can say, in general enough terms that I will not be spoiling anything: not all of the characters who survived until the end of Game of Thrones will survive until the end of A Song of Ice & Fire, and not all of the characters who died on Game of Thrones will die in A Song of Ice & Fire. (Some will, sure. Of course. Maybe most. But definitely not all.) ((Of course, I could change my mind again next week, with the next chapter I write. That’s gardening)).

And the ending? You will need to wait until I get there. Some things will be the same. A lot will not.

Martin’s comments should be good news for the many fans who felt the quickened pace of Game of Thrones’ final season diluted the character arcs and overarching narratives that came before it.

One last tease: Martin told IGN in 2016 that The Winds of Winter will feature a major twist that couldn’t be done in the show. “It’s something that involves a couple characters,” said Martin, “one of whom is dead in the show [by the end of Season 5] but not dead in the books.”

A Dream of Spring and Other Future Works

A Dream of Spring is the seventh and final book Martin has planned for A Song of Ice and Fire. It, too, is expected to be 1,500 pages or more, according to Martin. As for the story, Martin offered this during the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2016: “I’m not going to tell you how I’m going to end my book, but I suspect the overall flavor is going to be as much bittersweet as it is happy.” There is no timetable for its release.

In addition to finishing Winds and preparing for A Dream of Spring, Martin is authoring a second volume of his Targaryen history, potentially titled Blood & Fire, and additional stories in his Tales of Dunk and Egg series of novellas, which serves as the basis for HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones spinoff, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms . Martin continues to serve as an editor of Wild Cards, a shared-universe sci-fi book series he created in 1987. He’s also a producer for two active TV series: House of the Dragon and AMC’s Dark Winds.

Jordan covers games, shows, and movies as a freelance writer for IGN.

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Addiction, Motherhood, and Jesus with writer Anne Lamott

Writer Anne Lamott has garnered a cult following with her shockingly honest prose on love, death, faith, writing and more. This hour, her wisdom from a career that has spanned 20 books and 40 years.

This episode of TED Radio Hour was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour.

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The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List

Reading all the lists so you don't have to since 2017.

This year has been “unprecedented” and “unusual” and “an outlier” and “anomalous” and “freakish” and “extraordinary” in many ways. The Covid-19 pandemic has upended our way of life, our topics of conversation, and our entire world. However, some things will always be the same. What I mean to say is: Nothing can stop listicle season.

Yet again, I have scoured he internet to find out which books were recommended most on the “best of the year” lists, consulting 2020 roundups published by everyone from Literary Hub (that would be us) to Apartment Therapy. I read a total 41 lists, which recommended a whopping 952 different books. But a few were mentioned repeatedly, and you will find those ranked below, by order of frequency of inclusion. Does this mean these books are The Best? Only as much as any popularity contest ever does, I suppose. But if you’re looking to add some books to your holiday reading list, you could do a lot worse.

Here are the results:

Brit Bennett,  The Vanishing Half  

Rumaan Alam,  Leave the World Behind

Yaa Gyasi,  Transcendent Kingdom

Raven Leilani,  Luster James McBride,  Deacon King Kong

Maggie O’Farrell,  Hamnet Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Bryan Washington,  Memorial

Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies Megha Majumdar, A Burning Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & The Light Jenny Offill, Weather

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections Garth Greenwell, Cleanness Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults N. K. Jemisin, The City We Became Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible Barack Obama, A Promised Land Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You: Essays Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age

Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings Lily King, Writers & Lovers Brandon Taylor, Real Life Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead are Arising V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Karla Corejo Villavinencio, The Undocumented Americans Jess Walter, The Cold Millions

S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland Emily Danforth, Plain Bad Heroines Anne Enright, Actress Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile Marilynne Robinson, Jack Kawai Strong Washburn, Sharks in the Time of Saviors Kevin Young, ed., African-American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song

Alyssa Cole, When No One is Watching Diane Cook, The New Wilderness Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians Peace Adzo Medie, His Only Wife David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue Wayétu Moore, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women: A Memoir Aimee Nezhukumatathil, illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham Danez Smith, Homie: Poems Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays Adrian Tomine, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

Full list of lists surveyed:

TIME’ s 100 Must Read Books of 2020 ;  Vanity Fair ‘ s 15 Best Books of 2020 ; The New York Times Book Review’ s 100 Notable Books of 2020 ; Vulture’s 10 Best Books of 2020 ; Literary Hub’s 65 Favorite Books of the Year ;  Esquire’ s Best Books to Elevate Your Reading List in 2020 ;  Los Angeles Time’ s 10 Best Books of 2020 ; Slate’s Best Books of 2020 (Laura Miller); Slate’s Best Books of 2020 (Dan Kois); Refinery29’s The Best Books of 2020, So Far ; The Washington Post’ s 50 notable works of nonfiction in 2020 ; The Washington Post’ s 50 notable works of fiction in 2020 ; The New York Times’ Critics’ Top Books of 2020 ; The Chicago Public Library’s Best Books of 2020 ; Book Riot’s Best Books of 2020 ; BuzzFeed’s Best Books We Read in 2020 ; Publishers Weekly’ s Best Books of 2020 ; Library Journal’ s Best Books 2020 ;  O, The Oprah Magazine ‘ s 20 Best Books of 2020 ; Chicago Tribune’ s 10 Best Books of 2020 ;  EW’ s 10 Best Books of 2020 ;  Teen Vogue’ s Best Books of 2020 You Should Be Reading Right Now ; Apartment Therapy’s Must-Read Books of 2020 ; Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2020 ; Barnes & Noble’s 10 Best Books of 2020 ;  Real Simple’ s Best Books of 2020 (So Far) ; Kirkus Reviews’s Best of 2020 ( Fiction and Nonfiction ); Marie Claire’ s The 2020 Books You Should Add to Your Reading List ; Town and Country’ s Best Books of 2020 ; Parade’ s 40 Best Books of 2020 ; The New York Public Library’s Best Books of the Year ;  The Wall Street Journal’ s 10 Best Books of 2020 ;  USA TODAY’ s Best Books of 2020 ;  People’ s Top 10 Books of 2020 ;  The Guardian’ s Best Books of 2020 ; The Undefeated’s 25 Can’t-Miss Books of 2020 ; Men’s Health’ s 14 Best New Books of 2020 ; BBC’s Best Books of the year 2020 ; and The Telegraph’s 50 Best Books of 2020 ; and The Independent’ s 20 Best Books of 2020 .

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6 things from the bridgerton books that netflix must not change in season 3.

As Bridgerton season 3 draws closer, it remains to be seen how the story will adapt and change the book it's based on in the original series.

WARNING! SPOILERS ahead for Bridgerton book four, Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, by Julia Quinn!

• Bridgerton season 3 maintains key plot points from the book series for Colin and Penelope's love story to blossom authentically.
• Colin and Penelope's early meeting and shared love for writing are crucial to their relationship development in the upcoming season.
• The show must balance Penelope's reveal as Lady Whistledown with her romance with Colin, allowing for reconciliation and acceptance.

Bridgerton has taken the world by storm since its premiere on Netflix in 2020, and as Bridgerton season 3 approaches, there are some plot points the show cannot change from the story in the books. The TV series is based on the book franchise by Julia Quinn, with a total of eight novels that each track the love story of one of the titular Bridgerton children. Both the books and the TV show are a revisionist history of Regency-era London that turns up the volume on the intrigue, scandal, and drama, making the romances all the more watchable.

It's the first season to deviate from the order of the books, telling the story of Colin (Luke Newton) and Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) from Romancing Mr. Bridgerton , the fourth book of the series.

Season 1 followed the story of Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) and her love story with the Duke (Regé-Jean Page), while season 2 introduced the amazing enemies-to-lovers romance between Anthony (Jonathon Bailey) and Kate (Simone Ashley). Many fans are sad to say goodbye to Anthony and Kate's steamy love affair, but Bridgerton season 3 will be very different from seasons 1 and 2 . It's the first season to deviate from the order of the books, telling the story of Colin (Luke Newton) and Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) from Romancing Mr. Bridgerton , the fourth book of the series.

The series creators decided to skip over the third book, An Offer From A Gentleman , which encompasses Benedict's (Luke Thompson) story because Colin and Penelope's chemistry was so clear in the first two seasons. However, even though the order of the books has changed, that doesn't mean all the aspects of Romancing Mr. Bridgerton should be. Plenty of moments particularly between Colin and Penelope, must remain unchanged for their relationship to blossom and for audiences to see how much they mean to each other. Their friends-to-lovers relationship is a highlight of the Bridgerton canon.

6 How Colin & Penelope Met

Shown in a flashback, proving they always had chemistry.

In the book, readers gain insight into Penelope and Colin's early relationship and the events that set their love in motion. For the first two seasons, Penelope and Colin are good friends, but Penelope wants them to be more. She privately pines for Colin throughout her life, and he obliviously doesn't see her as anything more than a friend. In the show, it seems as if Penelope has always been attached to the Bridgerton family because of her closeness to Colin's sister, Eloise (Claudia Jessie). Eloise and Penelope are practically inseparable throughout the first two seasons.

It would be easy to assume that Colin and Penelope met through Eloise, but their first meeting is much more impactful. Bridgerton has incorporated flashbacks before, like in Anthony's season when he recalled the death of his father, and providing a look back at Colin and Penelope's first meeting shouldn't be omitted from the show. As teenagers, they meet on a walk, and Penelope's hat flies into Colin's face. In a moment that should be awkward and mortifying, Colin eases Penelope's anxieties and laughs at his misfortune, showing that he is genuinely a good fit for her.

Bridgerton Season 3’s Missing Character Creates A Huge Challenge For Colin & Penelope's Romance

5 penelope & colin bonding over writing, establishing their shared interests and intellectual compatibility.

What brings them together is their mutual love of writing, though they express it in different ways. In the book, when Penelope discovers Colin's writing, she's impressed and intrigued.

Colin and Penelope struggle with how others perceive them throughout the series. Penelope wishes to be taken more seriously and looked at as a romantic prospect by young men instead of an awkward member of a family with a middling reputation. Conversely, Colin wants people to see him as more than yet another charming Bridgerton who has little to offer besides his looks and social standing. What brings them together is their mutual love of writing, though they express it in different ways. In the book, when Penelope discovers Colin's writing, she's impressed and intrigued.

Though there's some concern over Colin and Penelope's romance in Bridgerton and how different it will be from the books, maintaining the throughline of a connection through writing will strengthen their budding relationship. The fact that Penelope is not only a writer but Lady Whistledown herself becomes a major point of tension between the pair. Understanding that Colin is a writer himself and feels jealousy at Penelope's success adds nuance to her role as Whistledown and depicts them as equals. This illustration of her success is vital as Penelope frequently puts herself down and thinks she isn't worthy of Colin.

4 Colin Discovering Penelope Is Lady Whistledown

Eloise shouldn't tell him even though she already knows in the show.

Bridgerton season 3's biggest character change will be Eloise. Particularly the relationship between Eloise and Penelope, since Eloise knows she's Lady Whistedown. The fact that Eloise knows Penelope is Whistledown is a shift from the books, but it was the right move for the show to tell Colin and Penelope's story in season 3. Penelope needs to break away from her friendship with Eloise to figure out who she is away from the Bridgertons. Additionally, her rift with Eloise will allow Colin to stop seeing her as a little sister and start seeing her as a romantic prospect.

However, Eloise must stay out of their courtship and not disrupt how Colin discovers Penelope's secret. Bridgerton season 3 has teased that Colin is going to help Penelope find a match in the marriage mart and slowly realize his feelings for her along the way. As they grow closer, he must discover that she is Whistledown on his own as he does in the books. If Eloise were to tell him and rob Penelope of the opportunity to explain her side of things, it could be disastrous for their relationship and would be a betrayal Penelope wouldn't easily forgive.

3 The Ton Accepting Penelope As Lady Whistledown

She deserves acceptance after being ostracized for so long.

It's in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton that Penelope's identity as Lady Whistledown was made public, but instead of being angry at her and casting her out of society, she was celebrated for her work as a writer. It would be difficult for the show to put off this reveal to another season, as Penelope isn't likely to be a protagonist after her relationship with Colin is chronicled. Extending Penelope's Lady Whistledown plotline past their story wouldn't work for the show. Colin and Penelope must end up married and be honest with each other by the end of the season.

Penelope has been cast aside by her friends and family so far in Bridgerton , and her Whistledown unmasking should be triumphant.

It would be shocking if Colin encouraged her to keep her identity a secret and continue hiding from the ton. Instead, season 3 should allow Penelope to come clean with everyone and receive the recognition she's waited for all these years. It's true that some of what she wrote as Lady Whistledown hurt people she cared about, but it was an important outlet for her and allowed her to discover her strength as a writer. Penelope has been cast aside by her friends and family so far in Bridgerton , and her Whistledown unmasking should be triumphant.

2 Colin Supporting Penelope's Writing And Ideas

Setting aside his jealousy and believing in her.

Penelope has faced humiliation at Colin's hands and has been hurt deeply by his actions. Even if he was never vicious or overlooked her on purpose, that doesn't change how much their relationship has to come back from in season 3. They both have a lot of maturing to do as characters, and the tables have turned so that Colin must prove he is good enough for Penelope instead of the other way around. A change that season 3 must make is having Penelope enter the marriage mart with newfound confidence and the realization that she can live without Colin.

However, she’ll soon discover that she doesn’t want to be separated as Colin evolves and starts to understand her more deeply. This change should be illustrated through his support of her being Lady Whistledown and the realization that she's a talented writer with an incisive voice that adds important insight into the workings of the ton. It's alright if he's jealous or hurt at first, so long as he sticks to the book's characterization of love and support in the face of learning that Penelope is more skilled and wise than he knew.

1 Eloise And Penelope Becoming Friends Again

Forgiving each other and being united as a family.

She and Penelope will be on separate paths in season 3, but this will allow them to heal following their blowout fight in season 2 and for Eloise to gain perspective into why Penelope wrote what she did as Whistledown.

Although Eloise's plotline and romance are bound to change significantly, that doesn't mean her relationship with Penelope should take a different course. In the book, Eloise gets married around the same time as Penelope. Of course, Bridgerton season 3 has moved up the timeline of these events, so it might be difficult to squeeze in Eloise's romantic prospects. However, there's plenty of opportunity for her to heal her relationship with Penelope and for their ending to remain the same. Though Eloise finds out that Penelope is Lady Whistledown differently in the books, she still forgives her and understands.

However, Eloise is much more concerned with who Lady Whistledown is in the show, and season 3 might deviate from Eloise's story for good . She and Penelope will be on separate paths in season 3, but this will allow them to heal following their blowout fight in season 2 and for Eloise to gain perspective into why Penelope wrote what she did as Whistledown. Seeing them grow as characters and come back together as adults who love and respect each other will be just as rewarding a payoff as witnessing Colin and Penelope fall in love.

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From Shondaland and creator Chris Van Dusen, Netflix’s Bridgerton is based on the romance novels of the same name by author Julia Quinn. The series follows the eight Bridgerton siblings, Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory, and Hyacinth, as they search for love during the social season and navigate life in Regency-era England.

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7 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Where are all the books about work? That question lands in our inbox from time to time, and no wonder: In terms of hours and paychecks and the sense of identity they impart, jobs are a consuming part of our lives that authors do indeed too often neglect. So this week we recommend three books that put the world of paid labor front and center: Adelle Waldman’s novel “Help Wanted” is set in a suburban box store, Hamilton Nolan’s “The Hammer” assesses the current state of union organizing, and Jane Kamensky’s “Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution” takes the measure of a proto-girlboss who went from starring in pornographic movies to launching her own production company with a feminist slant.

Also recommended this week: a look at Saddam Hussein’s state of mind as America and Iraq approached war in 2003, a study of African American literature as a reflection of Black history, a warning about the impacts of climate-fueled migration and, in fiction, Percival Everett’s sparkling riff on the story of Huck Finn, this time centering the character of Huck’s fellow runaway Jim. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

JAMES Percival Everett

In this reworking of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River, is the narrator, and he recounts the classic tale in a language that is his own and with surprising details that reveal a far more resourceful, cunning and powerful character than we knew.

“Luxuriates in language. Everett, like Twain, is a master of American argot. … This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful.”

From Dwight Garner’s review

Doubleday | $28

CANDIDA ROYALLE AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: A History From Below Jane Kamensky

In 1984, Candida Royalle changed the porn industry when she co-founded the female-targeted Femme Productions. As Kamensky convincingly argues in this scholarly and engaging tribute, the performer, producer and director was more than a feminist pioneer; her life mirrored that of the sexual revolution itself.

“Her rigor and thoroughness demand that the reader take seriously an underdog who made her name in a stigmatized industry. This book is a labor of empathy that refuses to simplify or valorize its subject.”

From Rich Juzwiak’s review

Norton | $35

HELP WANTED Adelle Waldman

Waldman’s long-anticipated follow-up to her 2013 debut, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” applies her sharp sense of relational drama and dark comedy to the retail work space. The big-box store is Town Square, and the cast of characters who toil there are as surprising and varied as the merchandise they stock.

“Waldman is skilled at building momentum and tension through intricacies of plot. The book shines whenever the group is together, concocting plans … in search of a shared sense of hope.”

From Alexandra Chang’s review

Norton | $28.99

THE HAMMER: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor Hamilton Nolan

The longtime labor reporter and former Gawker journalist’s lively account of the current landscape of the American labor movement paints colorful portraits of union organizers from across the country alongside a pointed critique of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

“Offers an impressive array of scenes from the front lines of the 21st-century economy. … As ‘The Hammer’ shows, the kind of solidarity that might naturally arise from shared frustrations on the conveyor belt doesn’t necessarily translate to the broader movement all on its own.”

From Willa Glickman’s review

Hachette | $30

THE ACHILLES TRAP: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq Steve Coll

Coll’s book stretches from Hussein’s earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, tracking the dictator’s state of mind with the help of 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein “recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon,” Coll says.

“Most of the story is vivid and sometimes even funny. … Unlike his main character, Coll succeeds in part because he has an eye for dramatic irony.”

From Noreen Malone’s review

Penguin Press | $35

ON THE MOVE: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America Abrahm Lustgarten

The climate is changing, says the author, a climate scientist — and drought, fire and heat waves are going to cause massive demographic shifts. To get a sense of the scale of these changes, the author examines studies and models that simulate future migration scenarios, and combines his insights with first-person reportage. The results are often alarming and admittedly speculative, but never less than compelling.

“The author’s eloquent personal insights … are astonishing as well as gripping, presenting an intimate understanding of why poor agricultural workers, beset by droughts and calamitous economic circumstances, risk everything.”

From Jon Gertner’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $30

THE BLACK BOX: Writing the Race Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In his latest book, the Harvard scholar shows how African American writers have used the written word to shape their reality despite constraints imposed on them from outside, using the metaphor of the box to reflect ordeals withstood and survived since Africans were first brought to this continent.

“The allure of this book, and the reason for its existence, are the narrative links he draws. … This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature.”

From Tope Folarin’s review

Penguin Press | $30

Explore More in Books

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Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

The mass appeal of Anne Lamott

‘somehow’ shows off the author’s gift for writing powerfully, deeply, often radically, while appealing to just about everyone.

The title of Anne Lamott’s 20th book is also an apt descriptor of the author’s extraordinary four-decade career. “ Somehow ,” after publishing four quiet, quirky Northern California novels between 1980 and 1989, Lamott sidestepped the fate of many authors with modest sales: beloved by few, unknown to most, destined to fade into literary oblivion. Instead, Lamott changed her genre, and her life. In 1989, single, poor and pregnant, she had a baby on her own, sustained by the kinds of boho characters who populated her novels. In 1993, she wrote a memoir about it. “ Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year ” plucked quirky, iconoclastic Lamott out of the margins and morphed her into a best-selling author — a status cemented by her next book, the instant classic “ Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life .”

No list of writing guides is complete without “Bird by Bird,” whose 25th anniversary edition was published in 2020, and whose sales now number in the millions. Lamott has since published three more novels and 10 more best-selling nonfiction books, including “ Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son ,” the 2012 sequel to her first memoir. Her 2017 TED Talk has been viewed more than 2.8 million times, possibly because somehow Lamott unfurls a capacious umbrella over groups of people so disparate, they’d rather stand in the rain than stand together: White Christians, Black Christians, hipsters, dog moms, baby moms, feminists, addicts, left-wing activists, the very poor, the very rich. Somehow, in her TED Talks and public appearances and in the 10 “wisdom books” she’s written in the past 25 years, Lamott, who is also a contributing columnist at The Washington Post , has kept digging deep enough, writing lyrically enough, taking the whole thing just seriously enough, to make each one a hit.

As she relates in “Somehow: Thoughts on Love , ” Lamott has somehow (actually, on a senior dating site) found her Neal, and, three days after receiving her first Social Security check, became a first-time bride. In her trademark godly yet snarky way, she extracts every life lesson from her latest new experience with the deft zeal of a chef reducing flour and fat to roux. “Love is compassion,” she writes, “which Neal defines as the love that arises in the presence of suffering. Are love and compassion up to the stark realities we face at the dinner table, and down the street, and at the melting ice caps, or within Iranian nuclear plants and our own Congress? Maybe, I think so. Somehow.”

Lamott writes not only of love’s glories but also of its quotidian impossibilities, keeping the reader gripping the passenger seat as she navigates love’s hairpin turns. What Christian, what addict, what Marin County socialite will not relate to the “basic format” of Lamott’s fights with her husband, which she relays in the third person as if narrating a play? “Every so often Annie does not get her way, or Neal says something superior and provocative. … Annie shuts down and becomes as quiet as the grave, while waiting for Neal to realize the gravity of his mistake. … Annie and Neal sit together grimly on the couch, ignoring each other while Annie thinks about how all men are pigs.”

At times, “Somehow” made me huffy about — by which I mean envious of — Lamott’s gift for writing powerfully, deeply, often radically, while appealing to, well, everyone. Who does this Lamott person think she is, dispensing advice like some dreadlocked, distaff Dr. Phil? “Be goodness with skin on. … Plant bulbs in the winter, help the poor, and light candles in the dark to see where you are, where you’ve been, what remains, and how much still works just fine.”

But then, on the next page, Lamott’s humble, hilarious self-awareness made this cynic tumble for her all over again. “My lifelong cross to bear has been secret derisive judgment, a pinball machine of sizing up everything and everyone. I am working on it, but the healing is going slightly more slowly than one would hope.”

No matter a Lamott book’s title, no matter the theme of the yarns that burst from its pages like clowns from a circus car, its message is the same irresistible combo of love, hope, faith and laughter. “I thought the secret of life was obvious,” the protagonist of Lamott’s first novel, “ Hard Laughter ,” reflects. “Be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life’s work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.” In “Somehow,” she offers hefty doses of each, save the panda, somehow treading the line between terminal positivity and depressing realism. She writes about the catastrophic wildfires that devastated her beloved Northern California, somehow leaving the reader inspired. “People showed up and spontaneously said things like, ‘The traffic lights are out. I’ll station myself at this intersection all day long and help direct traffic.’ … Thousands of people showed up across the state during our worst fires with bikes and maps, figuring out how to get to someone who might be cut off, and how to bring them water, a little medical aid, some food and love.”

It will spoil nothing to tell you that Lamott closes “Somehow” with a quote from her favorite William Blake poem: “And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love.” Like the book’s title, its conclusion is apt. No matter one’s external descriptors, Lamott speaks to the human in all of us, challenging us to bear her beam of love, and our own.

Meredith Maran is a journalist, a critic and the author of “ The New Old Me : My Late-Life Reinvention,” among other books.

Thoughts on Love

By Anne Lamott

Riverhead. 208 pp. $22

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Writing to the Bone: Our Memorable 2024 Book Party

WRITING TO THE BONE:

OUR FUN AND SUCCESSFUL

2024 BOOK PARTY

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 4

We gathered in person – first time since 2020! – for our Book Party celebration of members with recently published books. At least 50 writers, book-lovers, fans and friends enjoyed the three-hour party at the Dance Complex in Cambridge.

Chapter Chair Willie Wideman-Pleasants fulfilled the promise she made at last year’s virtual party – “next year In person!” — and reminded us of accomplishments of the past year.

The café style set up was perfect for lively conversation and for making new connections while enjoying the delicious buffet from Cambridge’s family-owned Greek Corner, allowing us, as Charles Coe put it, “to nurture the body as well as the spirit.”

We kicked off the program by hearing 16-year-old poet/novelist Eda Galvez perform her slam poem, “iFear” that calls on her peers to unplug from cellphones and social media and be with each other in the flesh.

Jim Kates then hosted the readings. We heard enticing tidbits from Kathryn Graver (memoir about becoming motherless and the three women who helped her stitch together a good life), Patricia A. Williams (novel whose characters are woodland creatures uniting to fight the pollution of their water supply), John L. Hodge (nonfiction about state laws designed to prevent classroom discussion of historical racist and sexist practices), and Charles Coe (poems from his third volume of poetry, Purgatory Road).

Charles then introduced our Keynote speaker, Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola, who urged us, despite challenges we face as writers, to “write to the bone” – with authenticity and passion. She stayed past the Q&A session to join in on the socializing.

We know that many members live too far from Cambridge to attend events in person: we hope to offer a video of the readers and keynote speaker, and continue to offer virtual “Writers Night In” gatherings and professional programs, along with our monthly e-newsletter, Update.

Thanks to Jim Kates for hosting the reading – and the raffle; Charles Coe for finding our inspiring guest speaker, arranging for the delicious buffet and the cool sounds of John Coltrane; Jim Kates for coordinating the readers; Shannon O’Connor for organizing our volunteers; Vicki Pleasants for welcoming arrivals at the door; John Hodge, John McDaid and Eda’s parents, who set up and/or insured the Dance Complex was left in good shape. Thanks also to everyone who attended, especially members: the National Writers Union not only “has your back,” it gives you front-facing opportunities as well, fundamental to our solidarity as writers.

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• Grievance and Contract Division
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Writers’ Issues We Care About

• Writers’ Pay
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